SAN ANTONIO – The cybersecurity field is continuously growing and the University of Texas at San Antonio is always working to stay at the forefront.
UTSA Cybersecurity Program
The UTSA Cybersecurity program began in 2001. Officials at the university say the Air Force asked the university to create more information assurance professionals, now known as cybersecurity professionals.
Over the past five years, the undergraduate and graduate cybersecurity degree programs have grown by more than 70%. Five years ago, the program had on average 1,200 students in it, now it has over 2,200.
“The cybersecurity program at UTSA is deep, broad, big and strong,” said Nicole Beebe, UTSA Professor of Information Systems and Cybersecurity.
Beebe says the cybersecurity program at UTSA is a multi-disciplinary field, meaning students have a wide array of options when it comes to picking a focus for their major. There are over 30 fields of cybersecurity students can pick from. Some of those include hardware, software, legal, law, policy, plus much more.
“Because we have so many classes that really span the gamut of cybersecurity, you can figure out once you get here what you want to do in cyber and pivot if it changes and figure out what you want to do,” said Professor Beebe.
In 2017, UTSA made history by becoming the first university to have a cyber degree offered fully online. Officials at UTSA say the B.B.A. in Cyber Security has grown more than 410% since its founding.
Statistics
According to the FBI, there is a cybersecurity threat every 39 seconds, and annually those threats equal up to more than $6.9 million in fraud.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the cybersecurity sector will grow 32% over the next 10 years. The bureau expects there to be a need for over 700,000 cybersecurity professionals in the United States alone by the year 2030.
What’s Next?
As the cybersecurity world continues to grow so does the threat of your private information being released.
Everything is connected to the internet now. Your cellphone can connect to your Ring camera, which connects to your email, which connects to your job. If one thing is hacked, they all can be. That is where cybersecurity comes into play.
“There’s nothing impenetrable, so you have to make sure you position yourself as a company, as a person, as a consumer in a way that’s secure,” Professor Beebe said.
UTSA is looking to combat cybersecurity threats by adding an Applied Cyber Analytics Degree.
Another way the university is helping is through researching Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning, or AIML. Professor Beebe says the researchers are working to figure out how to maintain the algorithms used in AIML and when to recognize when they have been compromised.
Lastly, UTSA has its Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute, or CyManII. This institute formally launched in November of 2020 and it focuses on advancing research in cybersecure manufacturing.
You can learn more about UTSA’s Cybersecurity program by clicking here.